Traveller RPG Story - In Walks a Stranger

You are drinking in a small run down bar in the Regina “down” port, which is a not so fancy way to talk about planet side port facilities as opposed to the orbital station.  The date is 001 – 1105, and as Imperial reckoning goes, stands for the first day of the year 1105.  It has been one thousand, one hundred and 5 years plus a single day since the founding of the Third Imperium and only a year since you were drummed out of the Regina Port Security Service. 

Gerald, the aging barkeep and owner of “Skittered” your favorite watering hole approaches “Lt. Blair, you want another drink?”

Nodding your agreement, he quickly pours a tumbler of dark amber liquid.  You may have always heard that belters (asteroid miners) like this drink.  It tastes like whiskey and ferments well in zero-G.  Just try not to think too hard about what substance the fermentation originates.

As you tip your glass up and start to drink, a short portly man in a business suite sits down next to you.  He smells like he comes out of one of the corporate buildings that encircle the Down Port.  People who work in the filter air of the big buildings have a smell to them, or maybe is a lack of the smell all the rest of us out here have.  Rumor has it that corporate types don’t like the natural Regina atmosphere, so they heavily condition and treat the filtered air inside their buildings.  Making sure to keep a positive atmosphere pressure inside, thus keeping out that pesky agricultural taint that follows you everywhere on Regina.

Regina is the capital of the Regina sub-sector in the Spinward Marches Sector.  Regina is only 25 sub-sectors away from Capitol, the center of civilization and the ruling seat of the Third Empire of Man, and at Jump 3 that means you are only a few months from Capitol.  Regina is classified according to the UWP (universal world profile) as a A788899-C.  What that means is that it has a mighty fine space port, modern shipyards, is an agricultural planet, with a good bit of law to protect everyone. At least that’s what the Governor and his minions always say on the news vids.

The portly corporate type turns towards you, looks you up and down and states quietly “I hear you are the man to talk to about finding hard to get pieces of data?”